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01/10/2024 08:30 AMYou don’t need the calendar to know winter is here; you don’t need the weather report or the holiday decorations. How, then, to know winter has arrived? Because it is time for the Essex Winter Series (EWS), the four-concert program that is an ever-reliable marker of the season.
This makes it a special time for Susan Guernsey, the president of the EWS board of trustees.
The series starts on Sunday, Jan. 28, with Four Hands Four Voices, a concert that features pianists Mihae Lee, the artistic director of EWS, and her longtime four-hands partner Randall Hodgkinson on piano along with four vocalists, soprano Amanda Forsythe, mezzo-soprano Krista River, tenor Charles Blandy and Baritone David Kravitz.
The Stu Ingersoll Jazz Concert, on Feb. 18, will bring back a jazz group whose popularity has ensured their continuing appearances at EWS, Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks. Their music highlights the group’s own versions of classics of the 1920s and '30s. Susan says that the most individual tickets, as distinct from season subscriptions, are sold for the jazz concert.
The Fenton Brown Emerging Artist performer on March 10 is clarinetist Bixby Kennedy, with Mika Sasaki on piano. Lee says that although Kennedy is a young artist, he is one who has already amassed an enviable reputation and enthusiastic reviews. The concert will take place at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester rather than at the usual location, Valley Regional High School. The high school stage will be set up at that time with the scenery for the spring musical.
The final concert of the season is the Essex Octet, made up of musicians of distinguished solo reputations, among them violinists Ani and Ida Kavafian, clarinetist David Shifrin, cellist Peter Wiley, and hornist William Purvis.
“It’s really a notable group,” Susan says.
When the group first played together several years ago as part of EWS, Lee named them the Essex Octet.
The name stuck, and now, whenever and wherever these particular musicians play together as a group of eight, they call themselves the Essex Octet.
Susan says EWS has a loyal audience and committed sponsors. Still, there is one thing she worries about.
“When I look out at the audience, I don’t see many young people,” she says.
That is an issue Lee has also thought about, and the result is the series of outreach concerts, started more than a decade ago, at local schools that have become a regular part of the winter series’ relationship with local communities.
Susan grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore. She met her husband, David, when both were students at Ohio Wesleyan. His work took them to Georgia, New Hampshire, and Tennessee before moving to Essex some 25 years ago.
When she felt her children were old enough, Susan, an elementary education major in college, went back to teaching. She subsequently got a master’s degree in education at the University of St. Joseph in Hartford.
Susan retired at the end of the 2021 school year after 20 years as a first-grade teacher in East Haddam. She says she misses her students but not the ongoing paperwork that accompanied her teaching.
In retirement, Susan had things on her to-do list. The first was knee replacements, both knees.
“Getting the knees done was one of the reasons I retired,” she says.
She also had a goal often expressed by people moving towards retirement.
“I wanted to get the house organized,” she says. “We’ve lived here for 25 years; there are things the children have not picked up, a whole lot of things, pictures, memories of a life.”
Susan and David have three grown children and five grandchildren.
Retirement also gave Susan the opportunity to get more involved in community projects. In addition to EWS, she is also on the board of the Essex Library Association.
Susan and David like to spend leisure time on their boat, Brilliant, a 40-foot Sabre. Every summer, in addition to local sailing, they do a New York Yacht Club cruise that has included places like Newport, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard.
The name Brilliant came to them as they were thinking about what to call the boat at a Hartford Symphony Concert in which one of the pieces had a section called Brilliant.
They are devoted to the name despite the occasional confusion caused because the Mystic Seaport has a schooner used in its sailing programs called Brilliant.
Susan has her own job at every EWS concert, though it is not a musical one. She makes a short speech, welcoming the audience, introducing Lee, and thanking sponsoring organizations, many of which have been associated with the series for many years.
It is not an impromptu moment for her. She writes out what she wants to say but is not fazed by speaking in front of a large audience.
“I used to worry about the greeting speech, but I’ve gotten over that,” she says. “You just do it.”
For more information on concerts and tickets for EWS, visit www.essexwinterseries.com